If you wish to understand the very powerful undercurrents for women that run through Donald Trump’s sad and hateful campaign for the presidency, you might wish to start by reading a piece my wife, Maria Wulf, wrote this morning on her blog, it is heartfelt and instructive. It is being shared all over the place.
I am very sorry that so many people are blind to his cruelty and insensitivity, but democracy is not always pretty. I think women feel the reality and danger of Donald Trump more closely than anyone, except perhaps, Hispanics, African-Americans, and refugees and their descendants.
To know Maria’s face and see it often is to understand her art in a special way. Maria is utterly without guile or pretense. But she has the keen sense of injustice that comes from people who have experienced it.
Her art, like her, is a kaleidoscope of feelings and emotions, all on top of one another. Increasingly, her work a sometimes subtle, sometimes strong feminist message of empowerment and strength.
Although her early life was difficult, I think she was saved by successfully hiding and protecting her heart and soul, it is almost a fairy tale story. She hid it and thus kept it safe until it was okay to come out. The people who hurt and dismissed her never knew it was there , so they never bothered to destroy it.
Her soul and spirit was never broken, they are out in the open now.
One of the many reasons the animals love Maria so much is that her emotions are right on the surface, they show up in her face as they do in her work. And animals read emotions much more intuitively than humans. They can smell our feelings. I feel the same way. My emotions are very much submerged and protected, but she sees them and knows that they are there, and they find her.
My sister is also a creative and loving person, she is also, like Maria, sensitive.
But she was broken down, criticized, interrupted, hurt, and undermined. They got to her soul and broke it into pieces. She has had to spend so much of her life bravely finding her voice and her place and healing herself. Perhaps this is why I am determined to never treat women or anyone else in this way.
Like so many women, Maria had to submit to survive and she believes that in many ways, she led a life of subservience. Watching Hillary Clinton, she felt the thrill of defiance.
Maria has become a writer, in the last year or so we woke up this morning talking about the Clinton-Trump debate, and especially Donald Trump’s whining that Clinton had not been “nice” to him, I could almost hear the middle-school bully whining that it “wasn’t fair” when one of his victims finally got sick of him and beat him up.
Maria well remembers people who hurt her and were cruel to her protesting that she wasn’t “nice” when she protested. So she tried to be nice.
Maria sat up in bed, and said “I have to write about this.” She is a writer now, as well as an artist. A couple of years ago, she was afraid to write about herself or most other things at all.
Like my sister, Maria felt she had to surrender to people, mostly men, who persuaded her that she wasn’t good or attractive or worthwhile. To this day, Maria, who weights less than half of me and is no bigger or wider than many sticks or tree limbs, believes she is fat, and has had to work so hard to not surrender to men, to be “nice” to them.
Blessedly, this has never been an issue with us.
From the first, she has told me exactly what she thinks, and when I have not been “nice,” I have heard about it directly.
And I have never protested when she challenges me, although sometimes I fight. This fear has never been in our relationship. She does not surrender to this any longer, and certainly not to me, and if I am in any way a part of that, I am very proud of it. She wrote a beautiful piece about this on her blog this morning.
One of the things she talked about was an article which spoke of women constantly being interrupted by men and seeing their ideas stolen. I asked her if I have ever manturrupted her, and she said no, not ever.
Watching Donald Trump try to bully and interrupt Hillary Clinton and make taunting faces and noises was both painful and emotional for her, it brought her back to the men in her life who had done that to her, and her long subservience to them.
For us, this debate wasn’t just about who gets to be president, it was about something very personal. Women have not been treated well or fairly in this world, and it is a glorious thing to see them rising up and finding their voice.
I guess you had to really be there to feel the wonder of this, it was a feeling very much in evidence in our farmhouse this morning. Maria felt so powerful to me that I jumped out of bed gingerly and said I’d take a shower first.